


Tin Man

by deskclutter



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: Spoilers for the ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-22
Updated: 2010-06-22
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:36:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deskclutter/pseuds/deskclutter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fakir contemplates a duck and a ballerina.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tin Man

  
There were once four and twenty soldiers made of an old tin spoon.

The last soldier had only one leg, for there had not been enough tin left to complete him.

  
Fakir remembers that story from a long time ago. When he had been a child he had felt sorry for the soldier with one leg. It couldn't help being useless, could it?

  
They live in a house by the lake for practical reasons. Fakir has decided that he prefers solitude now Mytho is gone.

He can hardly know that Ahiru once told Pique and Lilie that her family lived by the lake, but it gives her a warm feeling inside to know it's the truth now.

  
She works to be able to dance as Tutu once had.

To Fakir's critical eye, it looks as though her practice has paid off; she should surpass the elementary class.

Really?! Ahiru can barely believe it.

It's true, he tells her. She will most likely accelerate through the elementary class and get stuck in the intermediate class.

Ahiru quacks at him indignantly as he chuckles.

All right, he'll allow that she's not such an eyesore any longer.

  
Once upon a time she thought he really was a jerk. A jerk with a heart of stone, or maybe no heart at all because why else would anyone say that someone didn't need a heart?

But maybe it wasn't because he didn't have a heart but because that way he wouldn't get hurt.

Fakir shows Ahiru his true self a lot these days. She hopes he's learnt that having a heart isn't always bad.

  
Paper's a flimsy substance. One moment it's there and the next it's been blown away by the wind to be torn into two; into a fire where it turns to ash; into a puddle where it loses its form.

  
"Small and fragile," Mytho had once named Ahiru the duck.

Fakir, who has witnessed her clumsy and headlong pitching into walls and various other obstacles that normal people know to avoid, would strongly contest half of that description. (The 'small' part is ridiculously apt; even as she grows into a white duck he can still fit her in his shirt—not that he actually fits her in his shirt any longer, of course. He tries not to think too hard about the one time he did.)

Nevertheless, sometimes when she dances, her yellow feathers that have just the edging of white are stark against the green grass and the backdrop of the blue lake, the sun outlines her form: around her legs and through the edges of her wings to blot out the tuft of a feather on her head, and she looks as though a good breeze could puff her away.

  
When Fakir writes about Ahiru the duck, he always makes sure he does not write her into an incredible being whose only failing is to care too much.

She bumps into walls; she windmills her wings like a drunkard as she tries not to fall and fails; she ducks down to hide but the long feather on her head gives her away time and again.

"_Quack?!_" Ahiru says in horrified dismay, which he takes to mean as "Why didn't anyone tell me?!"

(He won't admit it, but it's cute.)

He does not give her false charms, so that the charm already inherent in this careless duck shines through all the better, for Princess Tutu might be Ahiru, but Ahiru is Ahiru and Fakir would prefer to keep her that way.

  
Ahiru is a duck, but Fakir works day and night so she can be a girl again.

Why don't we work together? She might have asked him, but she can't speak any more, not with a duck's bill in place of a mouth, and anyway she doesn't know how they might work together on this.

Ahiru dances. She dances so she will become all the better for Fakir to dance with when she does become a girl again.

She trusts Fakir will find a way, you see.

  
Why did the tin soldier love the paper ballerina?

He thought she was the same as himself. He thought she only had one leg.

But she had two legs, she was just raising the other one up!

The tin soldier didn't know that.

Why didn't he ask her?

He couldn't, because she was high above him and he couldn't walk to her with only one leg, could he? He never spoke to her.

Then how did he know that she loved him?

  
Let us return to who we really are, he had told her, so they had.

But what is a knight who must always be protected compared to a duck who is no longer a princess?

_Then how did he know that she loved him?_

Does it matter?

Not really, to tell the truth. It is enough to be near her; enough to be able to watch her struggle to guide her limbs into the semblance of a basic position that is not an eyesore.

It is enough to be allowed to keep this promise.

  
_I don't know anything about Princess Tutu; I want to know about her because she was in the book; I just heard about her…somewhere._

Princess Tutu had been pure and good, but her secret existence had been based on lies.

_Princess Tutu just flew through the sky. Or was that a cow?_

They're a pair of liars.

Ahiru doesn't mind that Fakir found out because Ahiru knows some of his secrets too. That makes it fair.

  
She can't really speak to him any longer, but he knows she can understand him so he talks.

Just because she can't form words doesn't mean she can't communicate.

She quacks in glee, in indignation, in worry. She's emotive, for a duck, and he has become quite good at deciphering what she means by now.

He likes it best when she laughs, so when she splashes him with water at the lakeside when she thinks he's been working too hard, he frowns, then plays along and splashes her back.

  
Fire, they say, purifies. It burns the extraneous from silver; it turns sharp rock into sharp steel.

Fire changes.

And in the midst of fire, paper turns to ash while tin melts.

  
Let us to return to who we really are.

Fakir is changed. Ahiru is changed.

In school, they exchange whispers in the hallway about how much more open Fakir seems to be, whereupon the girls scoff sadly that he still keeps to himself a lot.

The lake near the edge of Kinkan Town where Fakir built his house is home to what was once a yellow duckling and is now a white-feathered duck.

Occasionally, the duck quacks in acceptance or dismissal as Fakir sits on the pier, turning the pages of a book for the duck.

Sometimes it grows indignant and causes Fakir to fall in.

The girls could willingly murder it for that but it results in a wet Fakir, and so the duck is always forgiven.

  
Change, Ahiru reflects, isn't so bad, really.

She misses Uzura-who-used-to-be-Edel, and she misses Edel-who-became-Uzura. So! Ahiru has met two similar but different people whom she misses very much.

That's good, even if it's just a bit tragic.

  
Fakir once watched some girls in the art section turn paper into soggy paper. They had a large bowl of water, which turned greyer and greyer as more paper was turned into strips of clinging wetness.

They had nimble fingers, he remembered, as they moulded the sogginess into papier mâché sculptures. He wonders if her fingers could ever be as nimble and quick. Probably not, he decides. Not that it's much of a problem.

Change, even into something ugly at the outset, is not so bad. Fakir continued on his way back home to Ahiru thinking that.

When next he saw the sculptures, he found a Nutcracker duelling a King of Rats, and he remembered that even a broken Nutcracker can heal to become useful again.

  
Tin's shiny. It's been mistaken for silver before. The shine catches best on the dents that have been kicked into it by boys at play and by the children who use them as stilts. It doesn't break easily, it's very stubborn, but it can be malleable, if one knows how to handle it.

  
So what happened in the end?

The tin soldier remained useless and the ballerina joined him in death. In the fireplace where she burned away to nothing but ash and he melted, they found a tin heart.

Fakir the child found it ridiculous and sad. Fakir the writer thinks upon it at this late date and reassesses the story.

The tin soldier changed and the ballerina changed. They escaped the goblin and achieved a sort of happiness in the end.

He does agree with his younger self to an extent, though. Fakir, you see, hates tragic endings.

  
Fakir is a writer today.

Ahiru knows this because it is the weekend, and he does not have class, and because he is carrying a sheaf of paper under his arm and he has a long white feather tucked behind his ear where the end of it has gotten tangled in his hair though he does not know it yet.

"Quack," she tells him.

"Hn," he says absently, patting her head once and scattering crumbs of white over the water before he sits and spreads the paper across his knees. Ahiru watches for his reaction to finding his pen in his hair and laughs at his exasperated grumble before she goes after the tasty bread.

Fakir is a creature of routine, but he's not so much of a jerk any more, and Ahiru is happy when he smiles, in a way she never was when Mytho smiled: because Fakir has always had a heart it is more difficult to get him to smile.

  
"It's really that good?" he asks in horrified fascination as she gobbles down the bread.

"Quack," she tells him firmly.

He shakes his head, smiles, and breaks more bread for her.

They are neither of them useless.

**Author's Note:**

> Most of the vague and not-so-vague references to _The Wizard of Oz_, _The Steadfast Tin Soldier_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ (the miniseries) are intentional. I may have unconsciously put other things in, though.


End file.
